Ivy Zelman was “Poison Ivy” long before she called the 2008 housing crash. She didn’t like the nickname much in middle school, but things have changed, and the executive vice president of Walker & Dunlop company Zelman & Associates now considers it a badge of honor. She was an analyst at Credit Suisse who followed homebuilders in the years before the subprime mortgage crisis. Housing was unaffordable, lending was bonkers, and builders were buying land and scaling frivolously, she explained. “There was no money down and liar loans,” Zelman said.
“People used to joke, ‘Oh, someday she’ll be right,’” Zelman recalled, and in the summer of 2005, her team released a report called “Investors Gone Wild.” In the second half of the year, the market started to turn for the worse, and she doubled down. During a 2006 earnings call with Bob Toll, then–chief executive of McMansion builder Toll Brothers, Toll said things were getting better, and maybe the housing market had bottomed. Zelman famously responded: “Which Kool-Aid are you drinking, because I want some.”
